Workload Requirement

RAID 5

RAID 6

RAID 10

RAID 50

Capacity

Excellent

Good

Average

Good

Availability

Poor

Excellent

Good

Fair

Sequential reads

Excellent

Excellent

Excellent

Excellent

Sequential writes

Good

Good

Good

Good

Random reads

Excellent

Excellent

Excellent

Excellent

Random writes

Good

Fair

Excellent

Good

Performance impact of drive failure or RAID reconstruction

Longest

Longest

Shortest

Medium

RAID Policy

Recommended Usage Scenario(s)

Recommended Drive Configuration(s)

RAID 10

Applications and workloads requiring the highest levels of I/O performance for random writes.

Systems containing 10K and 15K RPM drives.

RAID 6

Situations in which I/O performance for random writes is not a key factor.

Applications requiring the highest levels of data protection and reliability.

Systems containing 24 or more drives.

Systems containing 7200 RPM SATA or Nearline SAS (NL-SAS) drives.

RAID 6 Accelerated

Optimizes the use of solid-state drives for crit- ical data.

Supported only on arrays that contain both solid state (SSD) and hard disk (HDD) drives.

For these systems, it is the only available RAID policy. It is not a user-selectable option.

RAID 50

Applications requiring an optimal combination of performance, availability, and capacity.

Systems containing fewer than 24 drives.

Systems containing 10K and 15K RPM drives.

RAID 5

Dell recommends against using RAID 5 for any business-critical data, although it may be required for certain applications, depending on performance and data availability requirements.

RAID 5 carries higher risks of encountering an uncorrectable drive error during a rebuild, and therefore does not offer optimal data protection.

RAID 5 can only be configured using the CLI.

N/A